1. Field of Invention
The present invention relates to mobile communication, and particularly to a scheduling method and a scheduling device for Multimedia Broadcast/Multicast Service (MBMS), and a base station including this scheduling device. In this manner, single frequency network (SFN) combining schemes are used for the service specific information and the service scheduling information, and MBMS control channels (MCCH) are formed and multiplexed with data channels. Therefore, the system is improved in robustness.
2. Description of Prior Art
3GPP (the Third Generation Partner Project) initiated a long-term evolvement (LTE) research project in 2005 to provide support for operators' and user's increasing demands with higher data throughput and better network performance.
Multimedia Broadcast/Multicast Service (MBMS) is a service introduced by 3GPP Rel6, which refers to a point-to-multipoint service through which a data source transmits data to multiple users. This service can thus achieve resource sharing of a network (including a core network and an access network) so as to serve as many multimedia users having the same demands as possible by using least resources. In a radio access network, MBMS service can provide both message-oriented multicast and broadcast including plain text with a low rate, and multicast and broadcast of multimedia service with a higher rate, e. g., mobile phone TV, by using a common transmission channel and a common radio bearer.
Currently, EMBMS (Evolved MBMS) is under various researches.
In prior art, the foremost control information, i.e., general information for the MBMS, can not be combined. This results in extremely poor robustness. Actually, some information, such as service specific information and service scheduling information, can be applied with a single-frequency network (SFN) combining scheme. This is, however, not reflected in the prior art, which leads to a low efficiency. Moreover, multiplexing of control channels and data channels is not provided in the prior art. It is to be noted that the multiplexing of the control channels and the data channels can reduce management complexity of the SFN area so that the data channels and the control channels can share the same resource allocation scheme and multi-cell coordination scheme.